“I was defying the most traditional part of myself for the first time in my entire life,” she acknowledges. Underlying both harmonizing roles is a rationality-disturbing mystic sensibility in touch with spiritual resonances of science and nature, reflected from the trilogy’s first sentence: “I powered up the transporter and said a silent prayer.”Īs Binti explains, master harmonizers can “create harmony anywhere,” yet her felt imperative to leave Earth and home to attend university on another planet disrupts tribal expectations and gender roles. Her attempts to negotiate agreement among various alien and tribal groups disrupts the status quo of assumed antagonisms. On the other hand, she is a mediator of division. On the one hand, Binti is a skilled designer of “astrolabes.” Her mathematically centered ability to channel, or harmonize, the currents of energy needed to activate these smart phones on steroids situates her and her Himba tribe as technologically adept. With Binti, her protagonist for Binti (2015), Binti: Home (2017), and Binti: The Night Masquerade (2018), as well as an accompanying short story, “Binti: Sacred Fire” (2019), Okorafor offers a futuristic character rooted in African tradition whose work as a “master harmonizer” bridges the technological and social.

A prime example of Africanfuturism as coined by its author Nnedi Okorafor, the Binti trilogy of novellas explores the often paradoxically disruptive effects of efforts to achieve harmony.

Binti the night masquerade